Python Imaging Library - Text rendering

Question

I'm trying to render some text using PIL, but the result that comes out is, frankly, crap.

For example, here's some text I wrote in Photoshop:

and what comes out of PIL:

As you can see, the results from PIL is less than satisfactory. Maybe I'm just being picky, but is there any way to draw text using PIL that gets results more close to my reference image?

Here's the code I'm using on Python 2.7 with PIL 1.1.7

image = Image.new("RGBA", (288,432), (255,255,255))
usr_font = ImageFont.truetype("resources/HelveticaNeueLight.ttf", 25)
d_usr = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
d_usr = d_usr.text((105,280), "Travis L.",(0,0,0), font=usr_font)

Answer 1

I came up with my own solution that I find acceptable.

What I did was render the text large, like 3x the size it needs to be then scale it resize it down with antialiasing, it's not 100% perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than default, and doesn't require cairo or pango.

for example,

image = Image.new("RGBA", (600,150), (255,255,255))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
font = ImageFont.truetype("resources/HelveticaNeueLight.ttf", fontsize)

draw.text((10, 0), txt, (0,0,0), font=font)
img_resized = image.resize((188,45), Image.ANTIALIAS)

and you endup with this result,

which is a lot better than what I was getting before with the same font.